Back to Dawson City, Yukon, Canada 7pm - July 14.
Two long days of car time.
Tomorrow we’re planning a zero travel day to actually do stuff.
Yesterday we traveled from Inuvik, 2 hours north to Tuktoyaktuk and
got our feet in the Arctic Ocean. It
wasn’t the cold so much as the mosquito hoards that shortened our dip. We had
lunch at Grandma’s Kitchen—really fast food on her porch or at the campfire
outback (IF the mosquitos aren’t so bad.) WE did the porch. We tried the
muktuk (Beluga whale blubber…. Sort of
tastes like undercooked bacon and Judd and I shared the bison burger, although
we haven’t heard there are bison up here. ) We keep hop-scotching with folks we’ve met at campgrounds or towns along
the one-way gravel road. (There’s only
one way in and one way out.) We trade
flat tire stories. We’re feeling a
little bold driving, having upgraded 4 NEW 8 ply tires for the 3 flat 4 plys
and just donated one good-but-used tire to the cause. (Northwinds Tire looks like a graveyard of used or not-so-used tires that someone might eventually want.) We drove 2+ hours back south past
Inuvik and camped at the last campground before the Fort MacPherson ferry. We finally shared the Lionetti wine that Judd’s Walla Walla work colleague gave us
when Judd retired. It was the SO- exclusive vineyard that you could only get in
by invitation or wait list, so we never actually visited (but that our back yard abutted so we saw their
vines and deer and ducks all year but never tasted their wine.) It was sweet
and red with notes of mosquito repellent.
The sun did not go down but we did, to get an early start today.
Surprisingly, we got up at 6am and broke camp to get an
early start on our 8 hour drive. No prob.
Unfortunately, the free ferry across the Pell River, doesn’t start until
9:15am. So we had about 2 hours to wait.
We cruised back the 10 KM to Fort MacPherson but on a Sunday morning at 7am,
nothing was open. Even the gas station, convenience store or church don't start until 10:00. We noted that all the buildings in this above-the-arctic-circle-land are more utilitarian than fashionable. We couldn't tell the convenience stores from the warehouses, because they all look like metal buildings with no windows. It must be horrible to heat buildings with glass windows. I thought the school looked like a penitentiary, but remember, there are 30 days between late Dec. and Jan where the sun does not rise. We're trying to imagine that. It's painful. We cruised by the cemetery, because one of the graves was the site of the famed Lost Patrol--a party that went off into the north and did not come back. The cemetery tour took about 6 seconds. So we read books inside
the truck cab for 2 hours at the ferry site because it was too treacherous to “walk” along the
river without full mosquito regalia.
We lunched at Eagle Plains (about the half way mark south) and we
continued to listen to our audio book of Games of Thrones all the way to
Dawson City (another 4 hours.) The views we’d seen going north looked
entirely different going south—maybe because the gentle rains cleared some of
the wildfire haze. We saw a bobcat, several dark foxes (they must be the Arctic foxes that turn white for the winter.) We saw pika (look THAT up) and we tried hard to avoid the little grouse that ran, s l o w l y, across the road... Judd spotted a lone Caribou with a rack the size of a riding lawn mower, and the promise of a heard of thousands on our tomorrow journey. Of course, the rain increased the gravel-road-dirt-mud but we opted for an RV park in town with a
CAR WASH! The mud and dust that came off the camper and truck was astounding. We didn't get in until 7pm but we must have done a triple
dose of loonies at the car wash. Three minutes of car wash for a loonie. (Canadian dollars are “loonies”—a
two dollar coin is a twoonie.) You also get 2 minutes of hot water shower for a loonie. Who would have thought that a hot shower could
mean so much after 4 days?!
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| Leonetti wine from Walla Walla in the Arctic Ocean- Beaufort Sea-- Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, CANADA |
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| Muktuk at Grandma's Kitchen |
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